The leaves of the shrub Catha edulis which are chewed like tobacco or used to make tea; has the effect of a euphoric stimulant.
1The stimulant in qat can cause excitement, loss of appetite and euphoria.
2It is pushing to ban qat cultivation in some areas suited to grain.
3Where would the jobs come from if qat production were stopped?
4Something in the girl's tone cut through Kerrek's qat euphoria, and he stiffened.
5Yet at Sanaa's bustling qat market, merchants shrug off talk of the unfolding water disaster.
6Neither government has managed to shut the qat markets.
7He returned to his native Melah in 1975 and is now a successful farmer of qat.
8Khat or qat is a flowering plant native to the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
9Craving for the mild stimulant has kept the qat trade going strong in an economy otherwise devastated by war.
10Already filling terraces across much of Yemen's mountainous north, qat is now making inroads into the plains further south.
11Yemen uses about 90 percent of its water to irrigate qat, a mild narcotic plant whose use dominates Yemeni society.
12At noon soldiers crowd the local market to buy bunches of qat, a mildly narcotic drug widely used in Yemen.
13Yet so intertwined has qat become in the social fabric of Yemen, that it has proven hard to weed out.
14People are very hard up here but qat makes things worse, said one Western diplomat who declined to be named.
15The subsidies also encourage irrigation of qat, a mild drug that pervades life in Yemen, where water is running out.
16Security officials said the U.S. couple were seized in al-Haima, an impoverished coffee- and qat-growing region that was considered fairly safe.